ARM micros rival Freescale's ColdFire

PORTLAND, Ore. óIndustrial designers can now choose from either ARM-based or ColdFire-based microcontrollers for mobile cost-sensitive portable medical devices, smart meters, energy distribution equipment, motor control and other industrial applications. Freescale Semiconductor's two new families of ARM- and ColdFire-based microcontrollers bring the price of battery-saving half-watt power consumption down to around a $5.

The biggest difference between the two new processors is the fact that the i.MX28x is based on an ARM9 core (500 MIPS at 454-MHz) instead of Freescale's own ColdFire V4m core (385 MIPS at 250-MHz). Also the ColdFire MCF5441x has its own industrial/motor support circuitry while the i.MX28x, which is used in Freescale's recently announced Home Energy Gateway reference platform, has its own display/touchscreen support circuitry.

Both the i.MX28x and the MCF5441x families are a part of Freescale's Product Longevity program which guarantees original-equipment-manufacturers (OEMs) that Freescale will continue to supply parts for 15 years of assured supply.

The title of the article is a little misleading, since the two parts are targeted at different applications. The Coldfire part has an EMAC and a DAC, whereas the ARM has a sophisticated LCD controller. I think the ARM would come up short on a DSP-intensive application. MIPS may as well be "Meaningless Indicator of Processor Speed".

It is amazing to see how every semiconductor company is embracing ARM as the brain for their future processors. Most of them have competing cores but hats-off to ARM for such a wonderful product and support community.

This chip fixes a bunch of the deficiencies in the i.MX233 chip that it's based on (and you can't blame FreeScale, as they acquired that design from another company). Namely, the MX233 had only 1 USB port, didn't support RAM larger than 64MB chips, DDR1 only (rather than lower-cost DDR2), and there was no parallel bus at all! But it still had all the integrated power and audio, and in just 169 pins/balls.
Our Medallion Linux supports the MX233 with a common tool-chain for the Samsung 2410, MX233, and Ti OMAP 35xx. All based on open-embedded, rather than the .... "less elegant" tool-chain that FreeScale supplies. Contact Techsol if you'd like help with your MX28x designs.

That is quite a lot of information from Benson. It is quite challenging for the medical equipment manufacturers to change a design and bring it out into market. Normally it takes years and no one really love to do such things with their working products. I do agree longevity of the components is very important to be get their place in industrial, aerospace and medical applications.

To me, the most significant aspect of these products comes in the close of the article: the fact that both are part of the longevity program.
These are not targeted at smart phones or other personal consumer devices. That longevity program guaranteeing 15 years of supply means that these are targeted squarely at the industrial controls market.
With consumer devices, it may be annoying, but it's acceptable to change the processor every year and if that component goes out of stock in two years, who cares. The world will have moved on and the device will be replaced with the newest latest and greatest. However, in the medical and industrial controls markets, it's frequent that electronics have to soldier on for ten, 15 or more years.
Here at Screaming Circuits, it's not at all uncommon to get requests to repair or rebuild a ten year-old control module. With these type systems, replacing the brains is not as simple as tossing the old one and getting a new two year contract. Changing processors can result in tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars in redesign and test work.
In the medical world, it's even worse. Lack of a direct replacement processor could very well lead to scrapping a very expensive piece of equipment. By delivering powerful processors with guaranteed 15 year supply, a whole lot of future problems can be designed out from the start.

The ARM based MX28x chips are mainly targeted for the home energy gateway applications. As per freescale website the complete platform evaluation products will be out soon. There is lot of expected market for the home energy monitoring once the smart grid application based energy distribution is in use by the household consumers.

Features aplenty, great! Now I guess the ARM board makes a good choice for an STB. Even medium end phones can deploy these chipsets and there is a potential for making decent profits with added benefit of higher battery life.
If they would have thrown in a DSP core then it would have widened the possibilities.

Commodity Product. Already too much competition in this market and is a Red Ocean. $5 price tag is attractive; May be a competitor for PIC.
Freescale may better focus on high performance multicore smartphone/Tablet processors like Marvell/TI, where the margins are high.
@Kinnar, These CPUs are too slow to be used in todays handhelds. Maybe 3-4 years this was fine. :)